Edinburgh has squirrels; I feel that it’s important that you know this.

This one was helpful enough to pose dynamically on a tree for maximum photogenicness & drama, and had a nice eye for appropriate backlighting. It’s really refreshing to see such dedication to the tourist experience.

 

Squirrel in Grass (pixel on memory chip, 2016)

They’re not exactly scared of people, though they are a little wary. There’s a safe distance, and they’ll be paying attention.
They’ll move if you’re too close for comfort, and they’ll watch you if they’re not sure what you’re up to.

The best approach, assuming you could see them at all, seemed to be to just stand there and wait while they got used to you. They’d not ignore you, but they would go back to an approximation of what they were doing.

It’s the spotting them that took some luck, because a squirrel in forage mode who’s not moving much is indistinguishable from a chunk of tree-bark, as demonstrated below.

First time I saw the adorable little buggers was in a park by the University, George Square.
Tamsin spotted them through the railings, and we saw them a number of times as we wandered by, up in trees or raiding rubbish bins, or just generally mooching about. Got within a metre of one once, as there was a sturdy iron fence in between us; It was using the stone footing of the fence as a path.

The pictures above were taken in The Meadows, just off the Meadows Walk, which was also a good spot for general people watching.

Here. for example, we have some folks playing cricket.
In kilts.
Because why not?

On a good day, and there were a number of them, the portable & disposable barbeques come out, and it looks like people are relaxing in a volcanic field.
Actually, given the ancient geological history of the place, that’s almost accurate.

And then there are the crows, attempting murder. And in this image, succeeding.

The Edinburgh Internation Festival & the Edindurgh Festival Fringe were in the warming-up stage while I was in Edinburgh, which meant that there was almost always a busker at the main crossroads in The Meadows during the day.
Once it was someone in casual-Goth attire playing what was probably a long-neck ukulele, and they were … bloody fantastic. Just sitting there, filling the area with music. We stopped to listen on a few occasions; Once I’m pretty sure they started with Pachelbel’s Canon in D, then started working around it until you could just hear it there, in the background.

I’m not sure that I ever saw the Meadows empty.
Even in the evening, which happened at 10pm or so when the sun finally went down, there’d still be people out there, doing their thing.

You’d see people setting up slack lines in the trees lining the walk, either to practice, and in some cases what looked like lessons were going on, in the less-formal ‘give it a go’ style.

This made me feel much more relaxed about trying to re-learn the Diablo.
Tamsin had taken me to Cascade Juggling, just to show me the place, and after thinking about it, I picked up a travel-friendly diabolo set. I left the purple monster I’ve had for years back in NZ, as it is not travel friendly – This one’s smaller & lighter, and the sticks are shorter & made from aluminium, so they weigh bugger-all.
Initial practicing is positive, though I do need to re-learn how long the sticks are, as I keep missing the catch when wrapping the strings around. Also, because it’s lighter, there’s less momentum available, so I have to pay more attention.

It flies high though.

Once the lights came on, and the crowds thinned out a lot, you’d get sights like this one, which was quite nice when walking back from wherever the hell I’d ended up that day.

I’ll close out with an odd thing I wasn’t fast enough to photograph.
In the evening, having reached the end of the Meadows Walk on my way back to The Argyle, I’d stopped at the lights, because a fire engine was on the way.
It got to the lights, slowed, and then pulled into the walk, driving down between the trees, lights still flashing, and drove into the park & out of sight.

There was probably a fire in one of the big-ass bins for the disposal of BBQ coals & dog waste, because that’s a combination of smells we all need, but I like to imagine they were heading for the Starbucks up the way, or maybe had decided to do spot of BBQ for dinner, and wanted to keep the engine close in case of a callout.